


The Last Homunculus

by neurosis (bigspoonnoya)



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Get Them Together, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-06
Updated: 2015-02-14
Packaged: 2018-03-10 17:28:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3298322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bigspoonnoya/pseuds/neurosis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It seems like she's never done protecting Roy Mustang.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> This earned the "graphic depictions of violence" tag for descriptions of blood.

There is so much blood.

It has only been eight weeks since she was covered in her own. The scar on her neck is still pink and fresh, barely healed.

She did not scream when the man leapt from the shadows and grabbed her, she did not scream as she landed expert blows to his groin and feet, nor as they slammed into the china case, shattering the dishes she’d arranged that morning. She did not scream as the man threw her to the floor, as the broken glass bit into her elbows, as he dropped down to finish her with a small blade and she thrust a shard of porcelain into the carotid artery of his throat.

He puts his hands to the wound but it is useless. She hates the blood, the warm wet stickiness, metallic smell so sharp she can almost taste it as it spills on to her hands and clothes, as it pools on the hardwood floors of the Brigadier General’s new apartment. The dog is barking like mad.

Riza, for all the lives she has taken and can’t forget, has never watched death like that. Up close, so close his stilling body pins her to the ground. She screams when she sees the light go out of his eyes: a single, shredded, scream of agony, an existential question mark, now that she has killed a man in the same way she herself nearly died. There is a cycle to these things; they were going to end it. There is so much blood.

* * *

They announce the Ishvalan Reform Movement two weeks after the events of the Promised Day. The Brigadier General, his sight only recently returned, gives a speech over the wireless with the official endorsement of Fuhrer Grumman: from the helm of East Command, he will seek to return the Ishvalan people to their homeland, and heal the terrible wounds inflicted by the unjust war perpetrated against their race.

The first death threats arrive later that day.

There had been threats when the Brigadier General was still the Colonel, of course, but those threats came in passing, from angered citizens on the street, opponents of the martial state unable to tell one brass-plated uniform from another. Once a drunken man took a swing at her superior; Riza dislocated the dissident’s shoulder. Easy stuff.

The new threats come sealed in an assortment of envelopes, spelled out with letters snipped from newspapers and magazines, or insinuated in pages upon pages handwritten of anti-Ishvalan rhetoric. A good number are postmarked from Central, and more from East City, understandably. Every single one crosses Riza Hawkeye’s desk, every single day; by the time their first week as “the Brigadier General’s office” is over, she has heard her superior called a coward, a tyrant, a Xingese half-breed runt, a murderer, an abomination, and a philanderer—this last letter, she suspects, is a broken heart couched in political dissent, and she tries her best not to wonder which of the Brigadier General’s ex-girlfriends might be incensed enough to send him hate mail.

None of it really bothers her, not deeply. She knows how to judge danger and there isn’t any in these letters. Some people need to voice their outrage at the prospect of change and the Brigadier General is change personified—young, strong-willed, with a plan, having already led a successful coup. His name lines the papers and echoes over the radio waves. She creates an official incident report for each letter and files them away, where he’ll never lay eyes on them, because he has never bothered to learn her filing system, because he is Roy Mustang.

But there is this one letter.

It is notable because it is one letter, many times. The same letter every morning, nestled in the stack of mail, beginning the day after the Brigadier General’s speech. Postmarked from East City with no return address. While others may send more than one correspondence, there is almost always some variation; not so with this one.

And it is the simplest, too. In a clean typewriter font on creamy cardstock, it reads: _Death to Ishvala. Death to the Reformer. We know you_.

There is a _they_ ,and a _you_ , another _them_ and another _us_. Every time she and her Brigadier General right a wrong, it seems to spin out from beneath them, generating more wreckage.   

After the sixth day, the clinical little cards frighten her, but because she knows they are _made_ to frighten her, she staunchly ignores them. Files them away with the rest. Watches his back closely, but no closer than normal.

Nothing has changed between them. Or, she doesn’t think so. Since they left the hospital she finds herself constantly embroiled in pregnant pauses, the two of them exchanging a significant look each evening after the office empties and they are alone together. He opens his mouth to speak and, seizing up, Riza announces that they really ought to go before it rains, or that she has another form for him to sign, or that Breda has been leaving crumbs everywhere lately and it’s driving her mad. For years her mouth filled so easily with words about the future and justice and what’s right for their nation, she has forgotten how to talk about this tiny interpersonal hiccup, if she ever even knew. Possibly not; with Roy, the feeling has always been there, muted, suffering from growing pains.

Maybe one thing has changed—they used to touch like it meant nothing and now she jumps if he comes within a foot of her, her heart in her throat, pink-faced like a schoolgirl. Nothing is different, they have yet to accomplish their goal of making him Fuhrer, or better yet, President, but after the Promised Day that silent pact they’d made not to complicate their relationship any further seems… moot. A lock on a door when the unwanted party has already entered—if anything, they are making it worse. But she keeps freezing with her hand around the key.

* * *

It’s strange how things came easier when she was passing him coded intell in the cafeteria under the constant scrutiny of an oppressive regime. Now that Roy is free to spend his time with Hawkeye unencumbered, he finds himself grappling for a way to broach the topic that never escapes the periphery of his thoughts. It’s a knowledge that lives in his head and his heart and teases his tongue but never finds his lips: he loves her.

He can’t tell when it started, and he doesn’t particularly care. Maybe since he first laid eyes on her, when she was thirteen and he not much older. He recalls sensing she was smart as a whip—something in the tiny machinations of her big brown doe eyes as she labored over small domestic tasks, as if frustrated by the work’s triviality and her own sense of duty towards it.

Maybe it happened in Ishval. Maybe the love got him out of that place, but some nights he feels as though he never really left, so that doesn’t seem right.

Maybe it was watching her blink him a message as the life bled out of her. But he doesn’t care to reexamine that moment; it is hard enough to shake the memory of her body in a red smear on the floor.

Once you arrive at love it doesn’t really matter when the journey began; looking back from the love-realization every word spoken and glance exchanged and moment passed in contented silence gets rewritten by the love. So the maybes mean nothing and everything. Mostly nothing, mostly he cares about _now_ , and getting her to touch him, he has been staring at her hands.

“Maybe I should have retired and let you have this one, Brigadier General.”

“And deprive Amestris of a leader such as yourself? Nonsense, sir.”

Grumman smiles behind the bushy curve of his mustache; if possible, he has gone greyer in the two months since he took office.

“That’s the charisma that’ll have you sitting at this desk one day.” Roy feels his chest lift and tries not to eye the seat too covetously.

“I hope so, sir.”

Grumman’s pen scratches across the bottom of a single-page form. “Brigadier General, you are hence forth reassigned as first officer of East Command. Congratulations.” The Fuhrer hands Roy the paper; the document feels heavy. “I’ll leave you to handle the reassignment of whatever subordinates you wish to accompany you to East City, since I suspect there will be a few.”

“Yes, sir.” He fights back a smile, staring at this form like a bar of gold in his hand. He is the youngest commanding officer of a military district in Amestris’s history—he checked the martial records this morning.

“And,” Grumman adds, not looking up, “Tell that granddaughter of mine to stop by before you take her away again.”

“She hasn’t come to see you?”

“Not since the hospital,” says Grumman heavily. He looks more grandfather in that moment than Fuhrer. Hawkeye’s distance does not surprise Roy; he knows where she’s been instead of with the last remaining member of her family, he sees her twelve hours of every day of every week, even Sundays. And he understands Grumman’s predicament, too, if with a different lilt: it is never anything less than delightful to see Riza Hawkeye again.

Roy salutes his Fuhrer. “I’ll be sure she comes by, sir.”

* * *

They stand in the cold dusty room that he calls a study, putting papers in boxes. Tomorrow they will load everything into a truck and leave for East City. Riza will drive; her Brigadier General will try to get her to play Twenty Questions and fail. He’ll laugh in the back of his throat and it will be a beautiful sound.

But tonight they are packing. Today’s letter arrived with a handwritten X in red ink beneath the usual message. She knows what this means—the letters have been coming from East City, and tomorrow will be his first night as head of East Command. Her palms sweat thinking of it.

“Ha, I thought I’d lost this,” the Brigadier General says happily; she turns to see him beaming at a heavy leather-bound volume, alchemical symbols glinting on the spine. He has shed the heavy coat of his uniform, rolled up the sleeves on his crisp white dress shirt.

“I’ve made sure your new residence is furnished with bookshelves, sir.” His nose wrinkles and he gives the room a speculative glance: for a study, the absence of a desk, chairs, and any kind of storage for books is striking. The books and papers sit in stacks on the floor—many, many stacks, the annals of his ongoing research—and some scientific glassware clutters a rickety little table. The rest of his place lacks the same necessities; perhaps the best-curated room in this apartment is the closet. He doesn’t dress like a man without a kitchen table.

(Every time she’s here she remembers giving him a tour of her father’s grand, half-dead estate, when he said, grinning, “Say, Riza, don’t you ever feel a little small with all these big old rooms?”

She looked at him so emptily, empty as her mother’s parlor. Father said that city people were rude.

“It’s impolite for you to call me by my first name. You have to call me Miss Riza, or Miss Hawkeye.”

Mister Mustang—he remains Mister Mustang until the day her father dies—gaped at her and ducked his head. “Sorry about that, Miss Hawkeye.” Father said he would learn manners if he wanted to learn alchemy. Father said a lot of things like that, and she hates that she still thinks of them as wisdom.

What will he do when he becomes President? What will he do in that mansion, all by himself? Imagine the scandal, the President of Amestris sat on the floor each night, eating beans out of a can. She makes a note to give him a stern talk on Inauguration Day about the importance of furniture. _Now that you’re the leader of our country, sir, you must sit in a chair even when no one can see you._ )

Back in his shabby excuse for a study, she dumps a leaf of parchment into a box. There’s no use keeping everything in order when there’s no order to begin with. The Brigadier General squints at her, half-smiling. “You’re looking forward to getting out of this apartment, aren’t you?”

He says this like the apartment is equally her responsibility, a thing they share. And she’s spent time here, sure, and more than a few nights on the sofa—he offers the bed, she refuses claiming the principal of the thing, because she is his adjutant and he her commanding officer—while in reality she fears the intimacy of sharing sheets. Too many smells. “I’m looking forward to the work we’ll do in the East, sir,” she says, too diplomatically.

He gives the room a mock once-over. “You know, I _don’t_ actually think any of Bradley’s bugs are still lying around here.” She frowns at the teasing, but he keeps going: “If they were, could they still be active? Is there a homunculus we missed? What do you think the mystery sin is, and what’s it going to do if it knows how much you loathe my apartment?”

He has the charm playing offense tonight. The wide smile, and he must know what it’s like when his hair falls in his eyes. Which, she supposes bitterly, is most of the time.

“I think the mystery sin is probably fraternization, sir.”

It is a heavy statement, maybe she is trying to be witty, she isn’t quite sure but the grin slides from his face. Riza swallows hard.

“Fraternization the Homunculus,” he muses, running a hand over the cover of his book. “Clever.”

The red X from that day’s letter flicks across Riza’s vision. “There have been threats.”

Roy glances up—the Brigadier General glances up. It’s too hard to call him that when his coat is off. “Threats?”

“Against your life. I think there may be an attack when we arrive in East City.”

His eyebrows lift slightly, lips parting in a pause before he speaks. “Do you need me to do anything about it?”

“I need you to be careful, sir.” He almost rolls his eyes—he’s heard this before, it’s not useful and she knows that, but she has to say it. “I’ll stay with you the first few nights in our new post to make sure you’re secure.”

An odd little light comes into his eyes. “You’ll stay with me, huh? Would that be—”

“On the couch. Sir.” She doesn’t intend this to be an answer to his question—she doesn’t care about his question, about the twisting of his mouth when he starts to ask it, she hates thinking of herself as some sexual item to him and wants to squash any inquiry that could stray in that direction. Of course, preemptively refuting an innuendo ensures that there’s an innuendo in the conversation somewhere, whether or not there had to be. And it’s a meaner one, a non-starter. He manages not to deflate but hardens over instead, looking older.

“All right, Captain.” She’s still getting used to that. Captain Hawkeye. She misses being the Lieutenant, a bit.

* * *

The first words they hear upon entering the yard at East Command are, “Hey, Colonel, looks like rain, don’t ya think? Better get inside before you’re completely useless.” Riza spies her superior’s shoulders knotting at the voice, one they both recognize.

They turn in tandem to witness Alphonse Elric—less thin than the last time she saw him, but not quite the picture of health—muttering in Edward’s ear: “He’s Brigadier General now, Brother.”

“Hello, Fullmetal, Alphonse,” the Brigadier General grunts.

“Boys,” Riza greets them, a little warmer than her boss, and Ed takes a cheerful step toward her.

“Lieutenant!”

“Captain,” Roy snaps. Ed tosses him a glare.

“Captain. It’s nice to see _you_.”

“How are you feeling, Captain?” Al asks brightly, ignoring the grumpiness between his brother and her superior.

“I’m well, Alphonse.”

“Where’s Miss Rockbell, Fullmetal? She dump you already?”

“ _Winry’s not my girlfriend_ ,” Ed spits, red-faced.

“Oh yeah? Well, I suppose she _is_ a little young for me—”

“ _Shut up_!” Ed’s the same color as his coat now. “She’s in Rush Valley, all right, she goes down every couple of weeks to do work for her customers there.”

Her hesitance to touch briefly forgotten, Riza puts a hand on the Brigadier General’s elbow and the Elric-related malcontent melts from his face; she proposes quietly, “Shall we go in for tea?” The brothers exchange a look, but not one she has time to read before ushering them into the building.

Behind them, she hears Ed mutter, “Like he can talk.” Hm.

The halls of East Command are just as she remembers them, objectively speaking, but they feel smaller. The day they left this place everyone celebrated the promotion to Central, thinking Bradley had seen something exceptional in Roy, and that the something wasn’t a propensity for troublemaking. She remembers where the tea and coffee things are, and makes a pot to share while they chat. Alphonse offers to help.

“Brother does like Winry,” he confides, as he stands at the teacart with Riza, their backs to Ed and Roy’s predictable conversation of one-upmanship.

“I know,” she laughs. She is no fool, and neither is Al, apparently.

“When are the others coming, Sargent Major Fuery and Second Lieutenant Breda, and Lieutenant Falman?”

“They’ll be relocating here in a few days.”

“And how’s Second Lieutenant Havoc? We weren’t sure…”

“Last I heard, he was hobbling around the hospital wing on his own two legs, distracting the pretty nurses.” Riza can’t help smiling: Alphonse’s interest in the wellbeing of the Brigadier General’s team grows out from a genuine pocket in his good heart. With luck, she thinks, this is something he’ll never lose.

“I like holding the hot teacups,” Al tells her, cupping one in his hands. “It’s so lovely to feel the warmth again.” The smile stretches over Riza’s face—these golden-eyed children have been through too much. When she was nineteen, she had to pull a trigger and it changed her chemistry; she can’t imagine what Alphonse and Edward have experienced. Yet again, there are no words. 

* * *

“Damn, that Alphonse has gotten pretty good,” Roy barks; he crashes through the front door of the East City apartment he’ll be calling home from here on out, stomping, trailed by a brown cloud: the dust on his jacket stirs and makes him cough, and he hears his Captain wheezing similarly behind him. Hayate’s yapping greets them. The little dog skitters into the entrance hall, wagging furiously.

“He certainly gave you a hard time, sir.” Roy feels himself scowl, and he starts ripping off the dirty shell of his uniform, his heavy coat and blazer sending up more dust as he throws them to the floor, nearly smothering the dog.

“Remind me to stop agreeing to alchemy matches with people named Elric. Never works out like I want it to.” Alphonse had made a dust storm— _made_ a dust storm! Right there in the middle of the HQ yard! And he’d run right into it, like an idiot. Plus, he had yet to master clapping to transmute; he was a little busy for alchemy, lately.

“Yes, sir.”

The only light in the foyer peeks through the open front door from the streetlamp, and when Hawkeye closes it behind them, they’re in pure darkness for an instant while Roy strips away his dirty clothes. He’s not sure where the day’s gone, it’s so late somehow, but he finds himself wondering that a lot with this job. Hawkeye flicks on a lamp and his hands pause on the buttons of his shirt—perhaps he’s too familiar in her presence. He turns to see her watching him in the still-dim light, the glint of a peculiar emotion in her eyes, one he can only identify because he has known her so long and seen her feel quite a lot. He has made her nervous.

“Captain,” he mutters, to himself mostly, with admonishing affection. Thinking, _how silly of you to be nervous around me_.

“Sir?” comes her voice, stiff and small.

“I’ll go bathe. I suppose you know where to find everything.”

“I do.”

“All right.”

“I’m going to conduct a perimeter check.”

His eyebrows lift. “You are?”

“To verify there are no intruders. And Hayate needs to go out,” she adds. The puppy rubs against her calf. 

He dumps his clothing at the foot of his new bed, made for the first time that day. In the bathroom he can feel sweat and dirt in a film over his skin, and the random aches of travel, and tiredness making his eyes itch. One glance at himself in the mirror is enough to draw a small _tsk_ from his mouth. No wonder Hawkeye was nervous, he looks halfway to death.

He could’ve stood under the hot tap forever. He starts singing to himself:

 _What do you do with a drunken sailor?_  
What do you do with a drunken sailor?  
What do you do with a drunken sailor, early in the morning?

* * *

The apartment already looks better than his last, even crowded with boxes they’d yet to unpack.

Riza breathes the night air, the chill it sends through her lungs. Hayate pisses on a bush. The Brigadier General’s new place comprises half a walk-up, and she circles the yard with the dog, checking for holes in the fence. There’s a spot on the little maple tree where it looks like someone might’ve broken a couple branches hopping into the yard, but she can’t tell how fresh it is in the darkness. Could easily be a raccoon. She tugs on Hayate’s leash to get him back inside.

* * *

Showers breed confidence. Sometimes for good measure, sometimes to disastrous results. The hot air and the feeling of cleanliness can trick a man into thinking he’s ready when he’s not.

He tells himself it’s the good measure confidence when the thought pops into his head, _Tonight’s the night_. Him and Hawkeye. He excels at romance, he’s done it a thousand times before!—well. A couple dozen times. Not as many as he lets people believe. Of course, Hawkeye’s different from those women, they have history, and she’s never shown herself amenable to charm. And what’s Lover Roy (he calls himself this only in his head) without his charm? _Regular_ Roy? And if she were interested, wouldn’t something have happened years ago? She knows him better than anyone but who’s to say that’s a good thing, given all he’s done? But no—the shower tells him, confident, _Tonight’s the night_.

But still, it takes a lot of willpower to shut off the water. His usually steady hands shake as he does up the buttons on a fresh shirt, the damp of his hair bleeding on to the collar. When he’s dressed he leaves the comforting, isolated steam of the bathroom and takes another glance at himself in the dresser mirror—having so many possessions is odd, like living in a stranger’s house. He can see the glow from the oil lamp reflected in his gaze. He was not blind for long, but it is brilliant to see again. Roy sighs.

A scream cuts through the quiet house, and he runs.


	2. Two

There it is again: Riza Hawkeye in a red smear on the floor. 

“Lieutenant!” He forgets that’s not her title anymore.

“I’m all right.” Except she isn’t all right, how can she be all right, she’s heaving a body off herself! Instantly he’s at her side, pulling her from the floor littered with broken glass and chinaware. The blood is everywhere, on her clothes and skin, her cheeks wet and her eyes red, and he feels her tremble under his grip on her shoulders. Against any better judgment, relying only on instinct, he pulls her to his chest in a tight but careful hug. She doesn’t fight him, or try to pretend this is something she doesn’t need. 

“You’re hurt?”

“No, no.” A canine whimper behind him and he releases her enough to turn and look. “He kicked Hayate,” she breathes, bending to the dog, who limps toward them. She sounds horrified, devastated by _this_ offense more than any other, blasé to the fact of the knife lying by the dead man, who had tried to—tried to—Roy’s fist tightens at his side. 

“He was here for me?” he growls. Hawkeye doesn’t answer right away, busying examining the wound on her beloved pet. 

“I assume so, sir.” Fuck, his fucking fault, every time this happened—her pain always traces back to him. His stomach knots thinking of her scream tonight, and the last time he heard her scream in pain, years ago, his hands on her back burning away the secrets that had birthed their power, another ouroboros. 

“Where’s your weapon?” he asks, putting his finger on just what seemed odd about all this blood. She would never have invited such a messy destruction.

Hawkeye retrieves something from the floor—there it is, her gun, the barrel turned red. In a swift move, she points it at the wall and pulls the trigger—nothing. “He did something to jam it,” she explains. “Alchemy, maybe, who knows how long he was hiding. I think they’ve been gathering information on us and knew I’d pull a firearm—if we look we might find a circle. I should have seen it before.” Her voice hitches, gaze flickering across the disarray as if seeing it for the first time. “It was sloppy. I’m sorry—”

“That’s enough, Captain Hawkeye.” So typical of her, to take everything upon herself, he wouldn’t allow it. One had to look out for ones subordinates. “I’m going to call the military police. Sit down.” Taking this as an order, she lowers herself gently to the sofa, but Roy reaches out a hand. “No, not here. The bedroom.” No one should have to sit with the corpse of a man she’s just killed. Prying her large eyes from the body, she gives him a glazed look, then nods and lets him lead her to the darkness of the other room. He has the twisted, inappropriate thought that this is not how he’d imagined her in his bedroom tonight. Foolish of him to think things could be so easy—he is always acting foolishly when it comes to her. When he leaves her and goes for the phone in the parlor, he mutters to the dead man in the red pool, “Fuck.” And grabs the telephone.

* * *

“I had intell,” Riza insists. “I had intell that there would be an attack when we arrived, and I did nothing.”

“That’s nonsense,” mutters the Brigadier General; she is half-conscious of his arm around her shoulders as they sit on the bed in his room, addressing the Chief of Police. She can hear officers moving in the hallway and the parlor, talking in hushed tones. 

The Chief—who has stepped in as lead investigator, probably because it’s not everyday someone attempts to assassinate the leader of their city on his first night in office—takes notes in a little book. “What kind of intell?” He doesn’t look Riza in the eye when he speaks to her. 

“Letters. Everyday. ‘Death to Ishvala. Death to the Reformer. We know you.’” Roy’s hand tightens on her upper arm. He is so close to her, and she feels slightly less hollow for it, but it’s obvious from the stiffness in the Chief’s pose that he’s not quite comfortable watching his boss, _everyone’_ s boss, hold his adjutant in plain view with such unmistakable intimacy. She might protest for professionalism’s sake, if she could get a minute alone with Roy to explain, or if she weren’t so damn comforted by the reckless abandonment of her hesitancy to touch and be touched.

The Chief raises an unkempt eyebrow. “Pretty damn ominous.”

“It was. But I had nothing to go on.” She glances out into the corridor as a stretcher passes by, a white sheet over the assailant’s remains. “I suppose now it will be all that much easier to track who did this.” 

“We’ll get them,” says Roy. The Brigadier General. Mustang. She ought to choose, already, choose a name and stick to it, but it’s impossible to capture all the shades of what they’ve been through together in a single name. She needs to address him by two or three different sobriquets just to get at the multiplicity of what he means to her, perhaps tonight—yet another shared trauma to be filed away under _protection_ —it’s time to just accept that he’s everything she could ever think to call him. 

“Yeah,” the Chief agrees half-heartedly, still making notes. Riza tries shoving her brain into a mode she understands—what would she do if it weren’t her who’d killed a man tonight? What if _she_ were the soldier who got the call about an assassination attempt on a high-ranking official? She lifts her chin. 

“You ought to contact Major Miles immediately. He’s our colleague on the Ishvalan Reform—we should advise him to delay his travel plans to East City until these people have been caught. And we,” she continues, turning to a startled Roy, “ought to call Rebecca. She can take Hayate for the night. We need to go to an inn.”

“An inn?”

“If you don’t want to head to your apartment, Captain Hawkeye, I’m sure you’re welcome to stay with any number of officers until this place is cleaned up,” the Chief offers.

“No. It’s harder to track us at a hotel and we don’t risk making anyone else a target.” Out of the corner of her eye, she spies Roy pursing his lips. 

The Chief seems taken aback by the authoritative efficiency in the way she’s speaking. “If you insist, Captain,” he concedes, and exits into the hall with a curt nod. Perhaps he thinks she’s a sociopath because she isn’t a sobbing mess, but he wasn’t in Ishval, he doesn’t know.

“I’ll call Rebecca,” says Roy. When he rises from the bed his arm slides up her back, and the fear flickers in her that he’ll feel the scars, before she remembers that he’s the one who put them there. “Go shower and change clothes and we’ll find an inn.”

“Yes, sir,” she replies automatically—he stirs at the formality, and she wishes she could take it back, but explaining would only aggravate the awkwardness. Riza tries to look at him in a way that says, _I didn’t mean it_ —if she can say _don’t perform human transmutation_ , this should be a small task. Catching her expression, he ducks his head, so his hair falls across his eyes. 

“I’ll call Rebecca,” he repeats, and goes into the hall.

* * *

Some images burn themselves in a person’s brain and don’t fade; they become the mental photograph couching an entire memory in its specific ephemerality, like the frontispiece of a recollection. For tonight, for Riza, that image will be one of Roy Mustang standing at the window in their darkened hotel room, as he pulls back the curtain to observe the street below, the yellow light from the streetlamp haloing him, and casting dark shadows over his face. There’s a furrow in his brow, he might be searching for something in particular, or generally scouting suspect behavior.  He keeps absently rubbing his middle finger and thumb as if poised to snap them, a nervous thing, he does it when he’s tense in the same way other people would wring their hands.

“We’ll be all right here for the night. We haven’t been followed,” he says. With a last long look, he draws away from the window, facing her. His smile is a weak effort. “Are you all right?”

“I’m all right,” Riza says, stoic, resisting the urge to hug herself. Instead she sits upright on the end of the hotel bed with her knees together, the same way she sat on the end of Roy’s bed not so long ago. 

Here they are, sharing a hotel room because it is not prudent to sleep alone after an assassination attempt. The day has stretched on too long, and demanded too much of her, and she can still feel the rasp in her throat from when she screamed earlier; she doesn’t have the energy for squeamish discomfort at being in such close quarters with him. The blushing hesitancy, weighing on her since the Promised Day, evaporates. She thinks of the blood circling down the shower drain when she finally got to clean herself up. Roy brought her clothes, because her bags sat in the parlor and she didn’t care to go back in—he’d pulled out the first piece of clothing he saw, it seemed, because she was in the plum satin wrap dress she typically reserved for cocktail parties and dates. The innkeeper had given the two of them quite the look when they’d checked in. 

“Sorry,” he mutters, with a loose gesture at the garment, as though he has suddenly noticed the cognitive dissonance between the circumstance and the dress. He sounds seventeen again.

“It’s fine.”

A moment passes in which she doesn’t know what’s going to happen next and doesn’t know what she _wants_ to happen next; her gun, sitting on the end table, is useless, and it makes her feel useless. She tried getting it apart to clean away the blood, but the interior has melted and hardened into nothing. It’s a hunk of metal in the shape of a weapon. Roy watches her from behind the hair in his eyes, and slides his hands into his pockets. 

She says, just wanting the silence to end, “Do you think we can trust the military police to catch these people, or will we have to do it ourselves? East City’s not exactly known for its stellar law enforcement.”

“I don’t know,” he says quietly. “I confess I’m not all that worried about it.”

Riza’s head snaps up and she can almost make out the odd glint in his eye—not a humorous one, the line of his mouth is hard and serious. “I’m worried about it. They want to kill you.”

“But they won’t.”

“You’re right, they won’t—”

“Because you’ll stop them,” he says, anticipating her. And he’s right, this is exactly what was on her tongue.

“Yes, I… I will.”

“Elizabeth.”

This is what he calls her when he wants to tell her something he can’t tell his adjutant and coworker and subordinate. It is a code. He’s signaling her this conversation will be different. Her pulse quickens—she is worried what he’ll say, and she’s so tired, she may have even more trouble finding her words. 

His shoulders sag and he glances to the side, sighing. “Perhaps tonight isn’t the night.”

“The night for what?” _Oh, why’d you ask?_ whispers a small voice in the back of her mind. 

In answer, he steps toward her. She is conscious of the fact that he stands while she sits. 

“Sir.”

“You know, I meant it.”

“Meant what?”

Roy heaves a tremendous sigh and pulls his hands from his pockets to run one through his unruly hair. “When I said I couldn’t afford to lose you.”

“And you won’t,” she replies quickly, hoping out of fear that this is it, this is all he has to say. But his mouth opens again and Riza closes her eyes. 

“Tonight I saw you lying in blood. Again.”

And she blinks up at him . There’s enough weight in this statement to warrant eye contact—he’s moved closer to her and he drops into a crouch, so she’s the taller party, now. She feels the power dynamic shift. “I’m sorry you had to see that,” she says, sensing how ineffective it is even as her mouth forms the sentence. Roy tips his head to the side, watching her again, very careful.

Before he speaks his gaze falls to the floor, his voice hitches, she reflexively reaches for his shoulder. “I’m a very selfish man, Hawkeye. Riza.” At the sound of her first name in his affected baritone, something in her chest tightens, a peculiar sensation, uncomfortable but a relief, the stretching of a sore muscle. 

“No.”

“Yes. I am. Listen.” His hand loops around the bare, sensitive skin of her ankle and her lips part at the unexpected sensation. His fingers are warm and her legs are cold. “I would like you to have an affair with me.”

“An affair,” she repeats, the words filling her mouth like cotton balls. Her ears are ringing. He has come so close to her and his hand is inching up her calf. Somehow she feels that touch in every corner of her body. 

“I know what’s at stake.”

“Roy.”

There’s enough hesitation in this simple utterance of his first name that he snaps from the romantic trance. “Damn. Shit.” And he’s back on his feet, moving away from her, pacing the room, making Riza wince and regret it. “I’m an idiot, aren’t I?” She tries to grab his hand but he’s moving too fast. 

“I didn’t mean that, sir—Roy,” she corrects, mainly to get his attention, but he laughs humorlessly. He must hear some false appeal to his overture in the change. 

“It’s all right, Lieutenant, no need to humor me.” He did that earlier, too, called her Lieutenant by mistake.

“I’m not—”

“I should have known,” Roy declares, speaking loudly but still to himself. “You’re so much better at me at these things, the perfect soldier, I should’ve known you weren’t going to—I’m a damned fool.”

And she is on her feet, hand around his arm to stop him in his tracks. “I’ve been taught my entire life to be quiet and take orders, so forgive me if I’m not the quickest draw at self-expression, sir.” 

Roy stares, open-mouthed, taken by the outburst. Her grip on his arm loosens and then falls away, but she stays standing, and they look at one another. She thinks about a lot of things: his career aspirations and the effect this might have on those aspirations should they be discovered, the likelihood that she would take the brunt of the blame for whatever transpired, the long road they’d already walked together and the certainty that no affair could be simply an _affair_ , for them, how she might revel in the intensity of such a relationship, the feeling that intensity had already affected the air between them in that very moment. The clean, white line of his jaw, begging to be traced. 

Riza has not wanted very many men in her lifetime. Now, tonight, she questions whether or not she has ever really wanted a man at all up until this moment, so immense is the impulse that rises in her chest and begs her to look at his body and its possibilities. She hasn’t allowed herself that speculation since she was fourteen and they would go to the lake, for Roy to swim and Riza to sit on the shore with a book and pretend she wasn’t looking. In Ishval it was hard to see anyone that way, and she has always appreciated the tendency of Amestrian military uniforms to negate the specific figure of a person. But now. 

“Yes,” she mumbles, though it is unnecessary because Roy has already stepped into her, his lips close enough to hers her skin catches the warm breath escaping them.  

“I’ve always…”

“I don’t think we should discuss anything that’s happened before now.”

He smiles. “I think that’s a wonderful idea.” His hands catch hers and the touch makes her realize that, yes, she wants him, but she is so exhausted her limbs ache at nothing.

“I’m tired, sir,” she gets out, and Roy’s face opens with concern, something that might’ve been lust dissolves into a sincerely dopey fret over her. 

“Are you all right!”

“Yes, I’m _still_ all right.” This is the third time she’s had to tell him this tonight.

He takes a deep breath, fears quelled, and raises a soft palm to her cheek. “Can I at least kiss you?”

“At least?”

“I’ll admit that—if you’re interested—there are other things I’d like to do you.”

“I’m interested,” she laughs, barely able to contain the affection rising in her throat.

“Excellent,” Roy breathes, squeezing her hand. “But not tonight.”

“Not tonight.”

“Good.” This is the instant she thinks he’s going to lean in, but he doesn’t. She knows the strange expression that’s come over his face, it’s a flicker of boyish anxiety, but it’s enough to stop him.

A heat crawls up her torso. Roy doesn’t get boyish around his rotation of women—not that she has met very many of them, but she’s seen his romantic persona, and this isn’t it. Which means something for her, for them. She supposes it was silly to entertain the notion that this development might be any less than significant for him than it is for her, silly to think that when they’ve come through so much, together. It wouldn’t make sense to fall out of sync now.

Fear has held her back for two months, fear of the future informed by the past. She fears that there will never be a day when she does not need to protect him. She fears she will have to shoot him, like she promised to do. She fears that the future just holds more hardship for them, and that to be in love would only worsen the pain should she fail or see him stray. It’s a fear that nothing changes—and she realizes looking at him in the darkness of that hotel room (why haven’t they turned on the light?) that everything is about to change, anyway, regardless. 

There will be pain. There is always pain. 

And there are things that aren’t pain. There’s Roy. 

She slides a hand up his shoulder and steps in to kiss him. It’s been a long time since she kissed anyone—dating is a luxury she can’t afford and besides, there’s Roy. And the weight on her lips flusters her, so she doesn’t do much of anything except hold there, pressing herself against him. Thankfully he remembers himself and his hands find her hips, pulling them together, worrying the watery fabric of her dress. His hands are powerful, metaphorically and otherwise but for the time being she elects to forget what they’ve done or might do and enjoy the skillful trail one runs up her side. He strokes her jaw, telling her, _relax_ , and she parts her lips beneath his; his tongue swipes the roof of her mouth and makes her shiver. 

When they finally part she thinks maybe minutes have gone by and it’s like she’s been drugged, she feels so lightheaded and euphoric and sleepy. He must sense this, or feel her droop in his arms, because he leads her carefully to the bed and helps her to get settled. He starts to pull away but she wraps herself around his arm. 

“You’ll stay with me.”

Roy pauses over her, his face a shadow. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Sleep here, I mean.” He makes a tiny, uncertain noise. Thinking of propriety, maybe, but it’s a strange reservation to have at this point. “Come.” Suppressing a smile, she draws him to the other side of the bed, and watches him remove his boots. The movement results in the white shirt stretching across the broad plane of his back, though he is not much broader than her. When he lies back he turns his head to return her stare. 

“Goodnight,” he mutters, and she nods drowsily, the pillow mussing her hair. Her consciousness has started to slip away. Her eyes fall shut. She feels the hands pull them together again, and her body is cocooned by Roy’s warmer one, the comfort nudging a sigh from her lungs. 

“Goodnight,” she replies. He presses a kiss to her temple. Her thought before she sleeps is that he might’ve picked the dress on purpose. 

* * *

“My sense of the organization is that they know how to put on a show, but they’re not very smart.”

It’s not disinterest that has Roy yawning discreetly into his hand this morning—Riza wasn’t the only one exhausted by yesterday’s events, and even after she’d fallen asleep in his arms, he was too thrilled to close his eyes for another hour. Instead he lay there and catalogued the aspects of their pose in the same way he catalogues elemental ingredients: _satin dress, blonde hair slightly damp, itchy coverlet, body heat, pierced ears, eyelashes._

He kissed her when they woke, and apologized for having yet to brush his teeth. 

Now she stands behind him at attention and listens to the police report, like the late night did nothing to her. She makes him look unprofessional—and yawns are supposed to be contagious.

“What makes you say that, Chief?” Riza asks, because Roy is incapable of contributing. 

“After we identified the guy, we searched his place all night. Saw the files he had on you two and the rest of the staff—it’s newspaper clippings and a couple of memos, and some maps showing home addresses and frequented businesses. We found the cardstock and typewriter, too. It’s their base of operation.”

“A more thoughtful organization wouldn’t send the man whose apartment they’re using as a base of operations to be their assassin.”

“Exactly. It’s sloppy.” The Chief waggles his bushy eyebrows. “In fact, there was no evidence of any co-conspirators. This may have been a fluke, sir.”

Roy lifts his head. It’s time for him to weigh in now, both the Chief and his Captain are anticipating a judgment about the situation. 

“Possibly,” he gets out, if barely. It’s pathetic. Behind him, Riza steps forward. 

“Please continue to investigate the matter until you’ve confirmed this man was working on his own, or apprehended the co-conspirators.” Her tone has the ring of a final order, and the Chief stands, giving them a quick salute before shuffling out of the office. Roy can hardly wait for the door to shut behind him—he lets out a tremendous sigh, slumping in his chair. 

“What time is it, Captain?”

“Eleven hundred hours, sir.”

“Can I go home yet?”

Out the corner of his eye, he sees her tense, and she steps around the desk to get a proper look at him. Her expression cajoles him. He missed the soft wonder, the glow that came into her face after their kiss. He thinks he’d like to leave and take her with him, to some place where he can make her glow again. “This is your first working day as head of Eastern Command, and there’s been an attempt on your life.”

“All the more reason to take a day off.”

“We don’t take days off, General.”

Unfortunately, she’s right. “Well,” he mutters, chin on his fist. “When can I go home?”

Her gaze twitches upwards, half a second, the subtlest eye roll. “Seventeen hundred hours, sir.”

There are flirtatious impulses he sometimes can’t contain: “And what will you be doing at seventeen hundred hours, Captain?”

Annoyance flickers across her face, but it’s the kind of annoyance half-endeared to the annoying party, and Roy finds himself grinning. “I’ll probably head home,” she says carefully, and moves into the corner of the office, starting to pour coffee. 

“Anyone special waiting there for you?”

“Yes, I’m rather looking forward to seeing my dog again.”

Roy laughs, deeply. He likes her sense of humor, the one most would claim she doesn’t have. It’s an honor to see that side of her. “Just the dog?”

“I might make a phone call to a friend later. If he’s patient.” With an inscrutable look, she sets a cup of coffee on the desk in front of him. 

“Patient,” Roy repeats. When she leans down with the coffee he smells the strong clean scent of his own shampoo. That’s right—she was in his shower last night. So he makes the mistake of thinking about her in the shower.

“It _is_ a virtue.”

“Yeah. Great.” Hawkeye in the shower. “What time can I leave, again?”

When she replies, he can hear her stifling a laugh. “Seventeen hundred hours.”

* * *

Someone’s cleaned up in the parlor, and they’ve done a decent job, even finished more unpacking—he realizes this is because some of the cardboard boxes containing his possessions got blood on them, but still, it’s nice to be free of the clutter.

He and his Captain parted ways at the front gate of Command. She saluted before turning to go, and he watched her walk off until she rounded a corner. And then he came back here. 

The next hour passes in silent agony. Last night might’ve been a dream; today they are rested, calmer, sobered up from the adrenaline. It would be easy to brush off what’s been said and done as simple error made in the frenzy of a taxing night. So he sits by the phone and waits, not even taking off his boots. Tries to read and then to revise some research notes, and can’t focus. At one point he doubts his understand of her message, perhaps she really _does_ have some friend she is thinking about calling. He wishes she hadn’t been so cryptic; could anyone truly have overheard them, behind the heavy oak doors of his office? He’d like to know how soundproof that room is—she would probably say this is an unprofessional inquiry. 

And then, like the sun ripping through parted curtains at the peak of day, the phone rings.  

 

 


End file.
